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Modernization Progress


tenjuna
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c2oc.com now points to my blog on here, which is proably going to start seeing some use now that it's running properly.

 

tenjuna.com now points to my Twitch stream, as my daughter and I are going to be doing something very cool when she moves in with me in a month. I am surprised at how easy it was to set up broadcasting for it.

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33 minutes ago, tenjuna said:

c2oc.com now points to my blog on here, which is proably going to start seeing some use now that it's running properly.

 

tenjuna.com now points to my Twitch stream, as my daughter and I are going to be doing something very cool when she moves in with me in a month. I am surprised at how easy it was to set up broadcasting for it.

 

Sounds good!

 

Everyone whom reads this should be tossing him a follow on Twitch and support our fearless leader, that has brought us all back together to fight the forces of evil once again

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2 minutes ago, Adelaide said:

 

Sounds good!

 

Everyone whom reads this should be tossing him a follow on Twitch and support our fearless leader, that has brought us all back together to fight the forces of evil once again

 

Well not much to see right now, but I intend to stream quite a bit in the coming months.

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Well thank you kindly :P

I have updated all of the mods I could find that were free. It's a bit shocking how little there is in the way of mods for IPB 4. If I hadn't already spent $350 on this, I would be going back to version 3 to be honest. It wasn't worth the expense for everything we have lost so far.

There are some paid mods that I do intend to add, but some of them are $30 a pop, and I am kinda broke at the moment. The ones I am most excited about are the Steam integration and the TeamSpeak server integration. Beyond that I am thinking about adding a Pages app to the site for static web pages.

More to come, but next up is working on the left side avatar area and getting Forum Gold up again.

 

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On 6/30/2016 at 2:30 PM, tenjuna said:

It's $35 actually lol but hey the help would be awesome!

https://invisionpower.com/files/file/8170-steam-profile-integration/

 

The first $30 is free, the last $5 is conditional on me getting a swank new dark red, silver, or black  "gold member" tag. (Seriously, I dislike yellow/gold. And yes, I realize the irony of that statement coming from a person of my religious background.) 

Let me know how to donate - paypal is probably the easiest way.

 

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The team icons are getting changed entirely, they are just there as a temporary placeholder as is your status as a Gold Member. So that was going to change regardless, no $ needed.

It would be simplest for you to just buy the file and email it to me at cain@dtrades.org. Otherwise paypal is enzod2@gmail.com but I am sure there will be fees involved.

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5 minutes ago, tenjuna said:

The team icons are getting changed entirely, they are just there as a temporary placeholder as is your status as a Gold Member. So that was going to change regardless, no $ needed.

 

It would be simplest for you to just buy the file and email it to me at cain@dtrades.org. Otherwise paypal is enzod2@gmail.com but I am sure there will be fees involved.

The only time there are fees involved is commercial payments on paypal. gifts are free of fees.

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Added a new pinned topic for paid mods list. If anyone feels like contributing I will not say no lol.

Almost finished with the major site work, in fact after this weekend I am pretty sure I will be 90% done with what I had planned. Everything past that will be the paid mods and adding game servers and new features, that kind of thing.

Not sure where to go from here, I was hoping more people would stop by to say hi to be honest. I think for now I will just keep polishing this ole relic, and once my daughter moves in we can switch focus to the gaming servers, clan stuff, twitch streaming, and all that. Maybe things will just naturally grow from there. *shrug* Otherwise I am still having fun so it's not been a waste of time regardless.

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  • 1 month later...
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Ok so I am back to working on the site again after taking a bit of a break. I was feeling a little disappointed about the level of response I got from my soft launch announcement, and between that and real life taking priority, I figured a break was in order. Having said that, I am definitely feeling energized and ready to keep working on this pig.

I have closed all of the previous work threads, as I will focus on this thread for the forseeable future.

I am in the middle of reorganizing all of my hardware, so work has halted on everything requiring me to build another server. Unfortunately the FreeBSD server I have everything running on will not easily allow me to run the gaming servers until probably next year, so this requires me to build a Linux or Windows server to take up that load. As it stands, I do not have adequate hardware for this, and am waiting for a Newegg promo code to pop up and save me a little money on this. With any luck, this will be in the next few days so I can continue that work.

For now, I am going to work on the avatar section that you see to the left, get it cleaned up a bit and see if I can re-add the TrustyTrader shield for nostalgia sake. Once that is done, the next item up is to reorganize the forums and clean up all of the outdated rules and pinned posts and such. Because I will need help with this, this will also be the time to get member groups fixed back up, get people into Admin and staff positions, and maybe do something with Gold Members (which I have never liked). Still thinking about this, but there has to be a better way to recognize people than being so obnoxious about it. I still have a few more paid mods to add; they have been purchased thanks to Enzo's generosity, I just need to get crackin.

I am nixing a few earlier ideas: there will no longer be an arcade due to Flash apparently becoming a completely dead technology soon. That's why there are no arcade mods for IPB 4. There are very few HTML 5 games out there, and I am not going to spend a lot of time beating that dead horse to death. Secondly, there is no lottery mod as of yet, though if one becomes available I will certainly add it; I am very interested in finding things to spend FG on. Next, there is no way to show who is CURRENTLY viewing a post/thread, but I did add the ability to see who has viewed it EVER; you can just click the handy dandy "Who viewed this" button up top next to the Bump button (which is also new lol).

Finally, it was just pointed out to me that name glows are still not working in Firefox. It turns out it's because FF and Microsoft Edge want to be special and not go with the current standard for CSS filters. I already have the fix for this and will plug that in soon. Name glows for all!

============

edit: nameglows for ff/edge fixed, turned out to be pretty easy fix. though now I have to figure out where the heck I made the change for topic colors and glows now, or else my OCD will never let me rest! lol

edit 2: topic colors and glows now fixed as well. actually glad this came up as I had a few minor coding logic errors to fix as well.

edit 3: apparently Edge does not like my fix. Luckily nobody uses it lol.

next up: avatar section cleanup.

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The Newegg promo code I've been waiting a couple of months for finally popped up this morning, so I have ordered a bunch of new hardware.

This will allow me to build a new server this weekend, which will likely be running Ubuntu Server so I can script the game servers more easily. If this becomes more of a pain than it's worth I am going to fire up an older version of Windows server, since the code I already have I know works on it. Ideally though I would like to get all of this running on a modern server OS, until next year when I can get it all running on FreeBSD.

So the goal is to complete work on the avatar area and member groups by this weekend, so that I can get the people who wanted to help work on this going in a direction of cleaning up the site structure and layout, which will allow me to work on the server stuff for a while.

And because my OCD will not allow me to do otherwise, I am still trying to figure out why glows do not work on Edge...by all accounts it should be right now.

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Regarding the glows, it would seem Edge only has partial support for CSS3 filters, and the Windows 10 Anniversary Update has broken it for me hence why I can't get it to "work". The way I have it coded should be working, and since it's not then it's MS being dumb again. In any case, I fought IE stupidity for years trying to keep my web sites looking clean, and I have no intention of doing so again; especially since IE/Edge only has about 1-2% of the browser market anymore.

In other words, use Chrome, you will be happier. If you refuse to use Chrome, then use Firefox, Opera, or Safari since I have verified that everything I am doing works on those as well. Beyond that you are on your own, though I am hoping it actually does work and it's just me that cannot see it in Edge.

I am moving on to more important things.

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FYI, the site will be up and down at random this weekend while I add 24TB of hard drive space to the server. It's a long process of replacing existing drives in the ZFS pool, and this will likely affect performance as well during the upgrade.

The upside is I will be able to start adding more stuff to my Plex media server, and once the OS upgrades to version 10 I will have plenty of space for the gaming and streaming servers.

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On 8/26/2016 at 10:27 PM, Future- said:

Looking good. Had the opportunity to see my quality posts from when i was like 14. I would like to apologize. Also, i'm still alive.

Thanks to this site i made a good friend, Paul, who i met this year when he made it to my wedding.

 

Lol yeah I would say the quality of most of our posts from 10 years ago was lacking.

Awesome that you made a RL friend from this site, I love hearing about stuff like that.

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On 8/26/2016 at 11:02 PM, Joz said:

24TB? Damn son, you got a pornographic addiction, don't ya!?

Hah no porno, just my Plex addiction. 1300+ movies and 42+ TV shows and counting. Working my way towards 2000 movies and 100 TV shows.

At some point next year I will be at 128TB, but that's about $7000 worth of hard drives so no hurry lol. For now the 42TB I have will last for a while.

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Lol I am dumb sometimes...I just realized I don't need to make a special site for the arcade and lottery, it already exists on v1 of the site lol. I have been playing all morning it was awesome.

http://www.happyfunbear.com/index.php?act=Arcade&cat=1 - you may need to reset your password to log in since it's the old database, but it works!

I have an idea that I may be able to use the usernames, passwords, and forum gold from this site within v1 of the site in order to make it more seamless, but this will be absolutely end of the list. For now just log in using your v1 login info or update your password. If you can't get in, PM me and I can fix it.

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Avatar area is as clean as it's going to get for now. I am about to throw my mouse through my monitor, as IPB 4 code makes no sense at all. I have been trying to move the forum gold line up to the other stat info, and everything I do has the opposite effect.

I have centered the Steam account info about 15 different ways, but somehow it is still left-aligned. Seriously?!?

I fricking hate CSS. Anyway it looks a lot better than it did. I will revisit this when I am not ready to press the delete key on the dtrades folder. :crazy:

Anyway, going to work on cleaning up the groups. Still not entirely sure what I am doing with those, but I will think of something I am sure.

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Yeah it is very frustrating, and I never took any formal classes on CSS or the newer HTML stuff, so on some of this I am just gliding by on intuition and guesswork. This kind of stuff used to be fun for me, but I burned out on it 6 years ago. It's not entirely all bad, some of this has been fun for me, but when it gets like today and I am just ready to walk away, these are the times I hate.

But I have learned when I start feeling like this to just move on to something else. I used to be very rabid about problem solving, but now I just move on. This is supposed to be fun for me, I don't want to burn out on it again.

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So I think this is what I am going with for group names and colors. In addition, I have decided to stay with the team icons I have, as they are the nicest ones I have found every time I go looking. I am going to update them though for the new colors and group names.

I think I may add a Newbie group to 100 posts, then they get promoted to Member

EDIT: new image I changed my mind a bit:

groups.jpg

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I have moved people back to Administrator and Moderators groups as best as I can remember. I kicked 20 people out of The VIP because I could not remember why they were there to begin with. Someone with 59 posts did not need to be a VIP in my opinion and I found one like that. Feel free to correct me if I have moved people to the wrong place.

Since I decided to stick with the same team icons, I cleaned them up and made them all resemble their new color assignments. So at least they all match now, that only took me 10 years lol.

I still need to do permissions on the groups and all that for access, but the next step will be forum cleanup and rearrangement.

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Lots of posts today as I put in notes for everything I am doing, sorry about that. But to summarize, I got the avatar area in a good place in my opinion, TT shield is back, groups are arranged with new team icons, and I put people where I thought they needed to be. A new gaming server is up with CSGO running, and I will likely add more games, servers, and custom scripting once I get more into that part of this project.

 

I still need to finish permissions and such on the new groups, but for tonight I am done. Once all that is done I can unleash the hounds on cleaning up the site and getting things arranged properly.

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32 minutes ago, Joz said:

So, VIP replaces Gold Members, the trusty trader shield is a vibrant emerald green looking thing, ten years and you still haven't discovered the edit-post function.

 

Yeah, that basically sums it up. Though I am open to suggestions on the group names and colors, what I settled on was a good mix of various factors.

It's not like I have limited server space, I don't think the extra posts will fill it up. :crazy: 

Besides, I learned long ago that editing an existing post just means people are less likely to read the update.

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Ran into a problem with one of the new drives, which I am continuing to troubleshoot.

Of course the problem waits until the very end of the upgrade, when it's not easy for me to go back to when everything was working fine on Friday. Ugh.

Anyway, I am running a scrub of the drive pool now, and once that is done I will try replacing the bad drive tonight, reformat it, then put it back in the pool tomorrow. With any luck it's just a fluke and I will be done with the upgrade by Wednesday.

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Drive upgrade completed successfully finally. I will need to take down the server again tonight to re-add the old drive array though.

I will be making a few more group changes at some point today so that work can commence on the site rearrangement.

Everything up to this point has been foundational work to get the site back up to something stable and modern. Work from this point forward is about getting the site ready for the Grand Re-opening. The goal for me right now is to do this on Halloween, though that is subject to change based on what happens in the next 2 months. I have changed the version of the site to v4.1 to reflect the switch to additive rather than restorative work.

We are getting pretty close to being done though. I am very happy with the way things are turning out.

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I have been working on rearranging a few things, and madd-hatter sent me a link to how the site looked previous to it being shut down, so there are some good ideas we will be implementing there this weekend.

 

I am working on TeamSpeak 3 server integration, which is going to be pretty slick. I have a 32 slot server here, may as well use it. I am also working on the cleaning up of the email database and getting some landing pages created for the links up top to the game and comm servers.

 

Basically I would like to wrap up v4.1 this weekend if at all possible. I think I am going to move Book-A-Server down to v4.2 because it is going to take a long time to finish, the same as the other line items for that version. I am not entirely sure if that means I am going to pop the cork on a grand opening email this next week, or if I am just going to wait for Halloween as planned.

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I think I was rushing myself too fast in the excitement of seeing things coming together this week. I am pushing off the Grand Re-opening until v4.2 is completed...the stuff in that version is going to be difficult to get going, and I don't want to be distracted from it.

 

Having said that, the intent still is to have v4.1 done this weekend, which is all of the mods and layout issues that needed to be addressed. Once this is done the site is functionally complete, it's just adding features from then on.

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  • tenjuna changed the title to Modernization Progress

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